Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

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> Classifies Semiconductors as Critical to National Security

Well, in a case of direct war with China or Russia, it will not be microchips you would be worried about.

USA is amazingly self sufficient nation, probably more than any other nation in the world, but... it lost far more critical items any nation must manufacture other than iphones.

You will not die from not receiving a new iphone, but you will die from lack of antibiotics if you catch gangrene, or something as dumb as typhus (my uncle died from it in his twenties)

USA can make a superweapons, but can't seem plainly make enough ammo for them. So much bad it is, a single German company produces more shells than entire American industry. All these big tanks, ships, and bombers will become useless in just 2-3 month of intense conflict.

After a big war, you will need huge amounts of basic materials to rebuild fast, before the enemy does the same. I have just to say: China has passed 1 gigaton of steel output per year

The US does not have the capacity to make vast amounts of ammunition that the US military does not use. It isn’t a Soviet-style military that relies on shear volume of dumb ordnance to win battles. The US does have vast stocks and reserves of the equipment it does use. For ammunition it does use, the US has large overages that they can give to other countries when the need arises that greatly exceed what they have a use for. A lot of the equipment that the US sent Ukraine was rescued from the scrapyard and would not be used by the US in any case.

The US military heavily relies on quick, precision fires in a way few militaries do as a matter of doctrine. Quantity matters much less than quality in these cases. Though the US has absolute numerical superiority for a lot of land war systems (e.g. the US has ~8000 Abrams tanks), half of which are in storage because they don’t have a use for that many. Ammunition for these systems is similarly in cold storage.

So... let's hope nobody figures out where they're being stored!

It's not iPhones that are the problem, it's everything built with modern technology. Do you honestly imagine that modern antibiotic manufacturing is anything but computer-controlled?

I think your analysis is sophomoric. You need both antibiotics and microchips in a large scale war.

We (the US) don't make a high volume of weapons ammunition such as artillery shells because we have a huge stockpile that is carefully managed and rotated. We make new shells, they go into storage, and the older shells come out and are used for training. Production went from about 14k shells per month a few months ago to over 30k per month today, and will flex up production to over 100k shells per month in the next year. That is just a relatively mundane engagement of our production capacity, if military planners believed they needed 2 million shells per month we would be able to reach that level of production do that in less than a year.

> USA can make a superweapons, but can't seem plainly make enough ammo for them. So much bad it is, a single German company produces more shells than entire American industry.

Can you cite this statistic about ammo/shell production? I haven't been able to find any reliable numbers on annual production by country or company. The sources I have found all seem unreliable and instead list the authors favorite ammunition companies. Among about a dozen of these low-quality articles, I've not seen any references to your magical German company as the highest volume.

I think the US military would be very worried about access to microchips in a conflict with China. Everything that makes their weapons hit their target relies on microchips, all the way down to radios directing troops on the ground.

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